Chapter 4
“The Sting”
Kolkata, India
November 14, 2048
2230 hours
“Superfly’s up and operating, sir.” Sergeant Sheila Reaves worked the controls of the entomopter and steered the tiny flyer toward the growing crowd spilling out of Eden Gardens, pushing and surging along Shihpur Avenue toward a stage up on the edge of the Maidan Race Course. “Got good imagery now…looks like the crowd’s getting restless. Jeez, what a mob.”
The rally was set to begin promptly at 8 pm and the fanfare had already started. On the main stage, Bengali dancers jittered and juked to a hard-driving drum beat, while off to one side, the Assimilator booths were already working overtime, sucking up a long queue of volunteers, disassembling the poor souls into atom fluff.
Lieutenant Johnny Winger studied the console he had set up on the bed in their rented room at the Milamani Hotel. PINCH ONE was showing clean and green, ready to launch. MAGIC ONE too, for the diversionary effort that hopefully would make the grab easier to pull off. Getting close to Symborg was going to be dicey. It would take the combined efforts of the whole Detachment, including the angels Table Top had developed. That and a little luck wouldn’t hurt either.
“Let’s do it,” Winger decided. He checked the time. Quarter to eight…if practice held true to form, Symborg would finally show up about 8 pm, after some warm-up acts, some speeches and testimonials, and whole lot of very loud music. That would give them time to get PINCH ONE and MAGIC ONE deployed, on station and ready to assemble. The angels had come from Table Top in separate containment capsules and their CQE, Master Sergeant Hiro Tsukota, now set the capsules to launch the bot masters and deploy the swarms.
The bots would make their way on internal propulsors across open ground—smoking, trash-strewn, rat-infested ground—for that’s what the Hooghly River front was west of the race course, toward the stage. The plan was to assemble the angels from loose bots in the chaos of Symborg’s first appearance, when all eyes and all attention were on the great robotic messiah. Winger had trained his Detachment hard for just this moment. When Symborg showed up and the shrieking and the fainting and the breast-beating began, PINCH ONE would quietly replicate and materialize in human form out of some smoldering trash heap nearby, like a genie from a bottle, and along with his comrade angels, would squirm and wriggle his way forward and approach the stage.
And if all went well, an angel named Kgani, closely resembling a bullet-headed seven-year old boy, would leap onto the stage with hundreds of others and surround Symborg in a massive love embrace.
Only this embrace would come away with pieces of Symborg that the eggheads at Table Top could examine. And Red Hammer would be none the wiser.
That, at least, was the plan.
“PINCH ONE away,” said Reaves. “PINCH TWO through FOUR spooling up.”
From the outside patio of the hotel suite, a faint mist drifted off into the smoky twilight over Kolkata. The first swarm was quickly lost to view and Reaves studied her control board, reading off system status, speed and heading. “PINCH ONE reports ready in all respects. On course for Maidan…heading two five five, one-quarter propulsor. PINCH TWO, THREE and FOUR ready to launch, sir.”
Winger gave the order. “Launch now, Sergeant.”
The remaining PINCH bots were quickly ejected into the air and drifted away from the hotel.
Winger turned to Deeno D’Nunzio. “MAGIC ONE ready, Deeno?”
“Straining at his leash, sir. Program laid in, course downloaded. All systems green.”
“Launch MAGIC,” Winger told her.
In seconds, the final bot and swarm were away. Now it was up to Superfly to follow the plotted courses of the five swarms.
“Q2’s studied the protocols and practices of every Symborg and Assimilationist rally that’s happened over the last few months,” Winger muttered to no one in particular. They were all back inside the hotel, following the feed from Superfly. Overlaid on a map of Kolkata and the Maidan race track, Superfly projected the position and course of each swarm as it maneuvered toward its target. It wasn’t uncommon for hordes of followers to try to rush the stage and touch Symborg as their ecstasy overcame them. Winger was counting on that happening again.
Winger planned to use this as ‘cover’ to insinuate his little angels into the people flow and get as close as possible to Symborg. One possible obstacle: Symborg always had a strong-arm security detail around the stage and Q2 was certain that some of them were angels themselves. They were there to protect Symborg from too much contact with the public. But PINCH ONE, a.k.a. Kgani, was a capable little angel and could morph into all kinds of objects, shapes and structures. In the end, some in Q2 thought the grab might only be possible with Kgani morphing into a fly or mosquito.
Even from the Superfly vid feed, the scale of the crowd stunned the troopers.
“Jesus H. Christ, that’s a horde,” said Corporal Mighty Mite Barnes. “Will you look at that?”
“Some estimates put these rallies at nearly two million people,” Winger reminded them. Indeed, the crowd surged and sloshed along alleyways and side streets as it swelled and strained against barriers and police cordons, pushing ever closer toward the main stage at the western end of the district, not far from a rail station astride the Yonpur Railway. The crowd seethed and pulsed like a thing alive. Even from the Superfly feed, it was apparent that Bengali police and the local constables were just barely in control of things.
“MAGIC ONE four minutes out from Assimilator booths,” reported D’Nunzio. Her fingers flew over the control board, bringing up telemetry on bot status. “I’m going to slow-rate rep now…a little bang to get things started.”
“Very well,” Winger said. “Proceed with the diversion. And keep your fingers crossed.”
D’Nunzio steered MAGIC ONE toward the line of Assimilator booths surrounding the main stage. Overhead, the Superfly entomopter gave a view of the massive crowd, boiling and surging forward, pressing against the police cordon like waves against a beach. Smoke from small fires had been set at key intersections, and the winds twisted the smoke columns into braided ropes reaching into the sky.
Already long queues of volunteers had lined up in front of the booths. Superfly dropped down to get a closer look at the Assimilator setup. There were dozens of booths, each manned by a technician and an intake specialist, who took down the name and vitals of each volunteer as they approached the booth. Once the preliminaries had been done, the tech assisted the volunteer into the booth and whoosh, nothing but atom fluff.
A steady stream of faint mist issued out of each booth, as the deconstruct bot swarms worked overtime, disassembling each volunteer and sending them right into oblivion…or as Symborg termed it: “unity with the Mother Swarm.”
“Three dozen miniature Auschwitzes…that’s what it is,” said Winger. “I’m glad we’re starting the diversion here. Deeno, what’s our distance?”
D’Nunzio examined her board, triangulated with Superfly’s sensors. “I make it less than fifty meters to the first booth, Lieutenant.”
“Execute phase two now.”
D’Nunzio sent the signal and the MAGIC ONE swarm went into big bang overdrive, swelling into a larger swarm, which would soon be lost in the crush of the crowd and the smoky fires nearby. “Max rate rep…now ninety percent. Maneuvering for first assault—“
The plan was to drop MAGIC ONE into several booths located a few dozen meters away from the main stage. The swarm of nanobotic mechs would insinuate themselves into the booths and work to bollix up the disassembler swarms, engaging the interior bots in a free-for-all that would slow down and scramble the assimilators, and bring a halt to the mass suicides that were so much a part of every Assimilationist rally.
“…now closing on target, less than ten meters…get me a Superfly close-up, Sheila…I want to see what the first engagement
looks like…picking up EM spikes now—“
The botswarms of MAGIC ONE swooped down on the booths, invisible to everyone, and penetrated inside. Moments later, Superfly caught an image of one booth bursting into flame, dense white smoke billowing out the top.
The crowd recoiled from the fire, like an ocean wave reflecting off a seawall, and soon chaos had enveloped the whole area. As MAGIC ONE descended and penetrated other booths, more fires started and soon an entire line of booths was affected. Spectators, technicians and volunteers scrambled away in panic.
Winger watched it all on the Superfly vid with a growing sense of satisfaction. “I’d say this diversion’s working like a charm. PINCH status?”
Sergeant Moby M’Bela studied his own board. “All PINCH elements on course, altitude eighty meters, heading two six five…we’re closing on those matatus parked by the rail line…there’s a tree stand right in the middle…perfect cover. Those drivers are all half strung out on khat anyway…we’ll look like a horde of flies just flew in. Permission to set down?”
“Permission granted…execute Phase Two.”
Indeed, as M’Bela predicted, the approach of the PINCH swarms did resemble a horde of flies or mosquitos. Superfly captured the scene: the taxi drivers waved and swatted at something invisible descending on their small opening from the sky. They scattered and left the opening unattended for a few moments. In those moments, PINCH One alighted and, on command from M’Bela, began assembly ops.
Moments later, Kgani, as a para-human angel resembling a lanky, 7-yr old boy with a buzzcut and unusually long arms and legs…intentionally designed that way by UNQC engineers to make the ‘swipe’ of Symborg bots…slowly materialized. Kgani would be the first of four angels Quantum Corps had devised for this snatch and grab mission.
“PINCH One at full config,” M’Bela. “Ops underway on PINCH Two through Four.”
Reaves steered Superfly closer to the taxi stand. For all intents and purposes, the view showed a few kids kicking cans around. The taxi drivers slowly worked their way back to the opening, gesturing and shouting at the kids. By the time the drivers had returned and begun passing around bottles of changaa to drink, the kids had moved off…four of them, lanky, teenagers and younger. They headed into the crowd and worked their way against massive throngs of people, navigating toward the main stage alongside the race track.
Reaves steered Superfly to follow. “All elements in position, Skipper. Moving on the target now.”
Winger wanted to know about the angels themselves. Deeno, Moby….what about configs?”
“All clean and green,” the two troopers replied in unison. “PINCH elements at full config. Grabbers operating normally. Now…they just have to get to the site.”
Winger studied the vid from Superfly. “Easier said than done….” The Detachment had hacked into the comm feed from Kolkata Police and Winger listened to that for a few moments. “They’re estimating nearly two million coming to this rally. I didn’t know two million could cram into this hellhole.”
D’Nunzio kept a close eye on PINCH One, leading the approach. “It would be easier to slog through solid rock, Lieutenant. At least, the structure’s regular.”
Bit by bit, Kgani and the others squirmed and squeezed and ducked and crawled their way forward, homing on the main stage. The crowd thickened as they closed on the pavilion that covered the stage.
“Something’s happening,” Reaves reported. She steered Superfly to a higher altitude, letting the entomopter orbit a few hundred meters overhead. Something had roiled the crowd, stirred the pot, and thousands began surging forward, straining, pushing, screaming.
“It’s him,” Winger realized. “Take a look…the Messiah comes.”
Indeed, Symborg had appeared on the stage, as if by magic. Winger realized it was likely that Symborg had initially deconstructed himself into a swarm and made his way to the stage that way, only to materialize into human form in some kind of dramatic fashion, like a genie. The slender man-swarm had now taken center stage and spotlights shone down in stark cylinders of light, while the music had fallen off to a steady rhythmic drumbeat.
“PEOPLE OF KOLKATA…I HAVE COME TO BE WITH YOU….” The loudspeakers reverberated and squealed with his voice and his words were like applying heat to a vast pot of water. The crowd boiled and steamed, stirred and frothed, moving always forward, pressing and crashing against the barriers and the police cordon like waves.
“….WE MUST LOVE ONE ANOTHER…WE ARE ALL ONE WITH THE MOTHER SWARM….”
With that, Symborg spread his arms wide and held out his hands to the ring of children arrayed before the stage. It was the signal they had been waiting for. The children screamed and began climbing up, some tossed onto the stage by adoring parents, through openings held by Security forces, streaming onto the stage to embrace the One Who Calls. In moments, Symborg was surrounded by several hundred children, all of whom pressed in on the robotic messiah and stretched out to touch him.
Embedded in the middle of the love fest was Kgani and the snatch and grab force of PINCH units.
“Moving into position,” D’Nunzio reported.
Now, Superfly flew lower and lower, feeding vid of the chaos that had enveloped the stage. Pinpointed on the vid, Kgani’s position was marked, as well as the other PINCH units.
“Seven meters and closing,” D’Nunzio went on. “We’re working our way through the crowd…ducking, bobbing, weaving…like walking through an ocean.”
Winger’s lips tightened. The moment of truth was fast approaching. “Deeno, make sure containment’s ready.”
“Grabbers are primed, position one,” D’Nunzio reported. “Less than two meters—“
The snatch, when it occurred, was almost invisible, even on Superfly’s vid. Kgani was shoved by the force of the crowd right up against the robotic messiah and his grabbers fired, snagging a handful of Symborg in the process. From the vid, Symborg showed no reaction. He was already being grabbed and groped and pushed and pinched by dozens of other kids.
“Got it!” D’Nunzio exulted. “Got it! Securing the sample. PINCH Three is close too…I’m going for it. Extra samples can’t hurt.”
Stage Security had been distracted by the fires and chaos around the Assimilator booths nearby. None of the security agents saw anything. None reacted. D’Nunzio steered PINCH Three into contact and secured more samples of Symborg bots.
“Pull ‘em out, Deeno,” Winger ordered. “We got what we came for. Let’s get the hell out of there…before the whole place blows up.”
“Moving out,” D’Nunzio reported. Superfly confirmed the maneuver. Kgani and the others now began working their way offstage, climbing down on the shoulders of some beaming parents trying to retrieve their own children. In moments, the four angels were on the ground, slithering and crawling and sliding through the crowd, working their way back toward the taxi stand.
Among them, Kgani and the angel known as PINCH Three carried a sample of Symborg tightly contained in their grabbers. D’Nunzio studied their status on her board, made sure the samples were in proper containment.
Back at the taxi stand, Kgani ran headlong into a pair of grungy-looking matatu drivers, leaning against a tree, both chewing khat and sharing a flask of something.
“Get lost, kutu…this is our tree…move along….”
Superfly hovered a few meters over the taxi stand and provided vid of the whole scene.
D’Nunzio swore. “I don’t want to go small with them watching everything. Lieutenant, permission to engage…get rid of these dirtbags?”
Winger studied the scene. Kgani needed to get back to base with his prize. Quantum Corps needed those bots pinched from Symborg.
“Permission granted. Make these slugs disappear but do it quick.”
“With pleasure, sir.” D’Nunzio’s fingers flew over the keyboard on her console. She dialed up a config for speed-disas
sembly and sent it. The Kgani-angel received the command immediately, the Superfly vid showing the result.
Where once had stood a lanky seven-year old Bengali boy, there now materialized a small faint glowing fog, swelling outward and upward from the boy’s feet into the air. The matatu drivers backed off immediately and one of them ran for his taxi, leaping into the open cab in one motion, trying desperately to get the thing started.
The other driver wasn’t so lucky. The Kgani-angel had fully morphed into a tight pulsating swarm, like an angry horde of bees and it fell upon the driver with full fury. The fog thickened and the light strobed and flickered as nanomech hell swept the taxi stand clean.
When it was all over, there wasn’t even any ash. The driver was gone, now so much atom fluff.
“Obstruction removed, sir,” D’Nunzio reported with satisfaction.
“Okay,” Winger checked the time. “Recall the bots…get ‘em back into containment so we can get out of here. I don’t like the looks of that crowd.”
Winger sent the command and ten minutes later, the balcony outside their hotel room was enveloped in a faint mist as the swarms returned to base. Reaves and Gibbs gathered the swarms into containment and made sure the bots were secure and stable.
Now it was time for the Detachment to vanish.
Extracted by lifter from the hotel roof, the Detachment made its way to an isolated runway at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Airport, where a hyperjet was waiting. They boarded and once again, checked containment of the Symborg pinch.
“A lot of people are waiting on these pods,” Winger told the hyperjet crew.
Table Top was a 2-hour suborbital hop, rocketing across the top of the atmosphere, some eight thousand miles. Most of the trip, Winger and his troopers dozed in the cargo hold…Reaves and D’Nunzio both curled up against the containment pods secured by webbing along one wall. It was only when the snow-covered mesa that was Table Top came into view that Winger finally began to relax. The mission was almost over.
The hyperjet set down on the north lift pad and the pods were conveyed under heavy guard to the domed containment center south of the barracks and the Ops building. Winger followed Reaves, D’Nunzio, Barnes and M’Bela to the vault, checked through security and, in short order, found himself staring at an imager screen filled with scaffolding hung with what looked like a bunch of grapes.
“That’s it?” he asked a nearby tech. The tech was a big-boned bald guy. His name plate ready Stefans.
“Symborg…in the flesh,” Stefans told him. “We’re doing initial scans, measuring bond energies, basic geometry, just trying to tickle the little guys and see what makes them tick.”
“Doesn’t look like much. My Detachment went through hell to grab those samples.”
Stefans sniffed. “It’s not the appearance that counts, Lieutenant. It’s what’s under the hood. These buggers have all kinds of capabilities we haven’t figured out.”
Winger was unconvinced. “I say zap the bejeezus out of him. HERF the bastard and be done with it.”
“That’s the trouble with you atomgrabbers,” Stefans came back. “That’s your answer to every problem…fry the bastards. Has it occurred to you that what you’re seeing here, what we’re dealing with here is a direct offshoot of Red Hammer itself? We can zap it all day long but if we don’t get the master, it just regenerates.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Winger said. “It’s still a cloud of bugs.”
“Our mission,” Stefans informed him, “isn’t just to zap the bastard. We can do that anytime we want. What we have to do here is find some weakness that we can use to discredit Symborg. That’s the only way we’ll defeat this Assimilationist crap. Somehow, some way, we’ve got to find a way to bollix up the master, so the angel’s not so stable, so he starts doing and saying things that don’t make any sense…gum up the comms with Red Hammer and make Symborg into a puppet without strings. That’s our mission.”
Winger was already heading out the door. He had a debriefing with Major Kraft and Major Lofton on vid in ten minutes. “Sounds like politics and psych-war to me. Leave me out.”
Stefans figured soldiers and atomgrabbers were all alike…too many guns and not enough brains. He went back to his imager controls, probing the bots now in containment with electromagnetic fingers, studying what reactions each little pulse provoked. He knew Kraft and Lofton expected results and reports.
If Symborg were to be defeated, they had to find some weakness they could exploit and they had to find it soon.
U.N. Quantum Corps Base
Table Top Mountain,
Idaho, USA
November 16, 2048
It was Luis Principal, quantum engineer at Table Top, who had the idea first.
For several days, engineers and technicians had been studying the captured remnant bots collected from Symborg with a fierce determination to find something…anything…they could use to interfere with the swarm’s config engine, something they could use to discredit the robotic celebrity and slow the spread of Assimilationism. UNIFORCE Labs in Paris had concocted something they were calling a disentangler, but the device was still unproven in tactical situations and there were only a few experimental setups. If it worked, the disentangler might screw up Symborg’s link with Red Hammer. But Symborg himself would remain.
And besides, whoever said the geniuses at UNIFORCE had a monopoly on good ideas.
“Somehow, we need some kind of Trojan horse,” Principal theorized one afternoon at the commissary adjacent to Containment, slurping a coffee with a few colleagues. “Our own immune system has the answer, if we just ask the right question. Think about it: how does an antigen work? It’s a molecule that induces a response from the immune system. But there are viruses, like HIV, that work against this…they block the response by fooling or infecting the immune system. They interfere with antigens. We can do the same thing with Symborg.”
“Luis—“ said Khalid Shaheen, an engineer with the Containment lab, “you’ve had too much of that coffee…it’s fried what’s left of your brain.”
“No really, I’ve been thinking…come with me to the Lab…I’ll show you what I’ve been working on.”
Principal showed Shaheen and several others the basics of a new device he’d spent the afternoon cobbling together, something he called a fold-blocker.
“I took a basic histo-compatibility antigen design and just sort of tweaked it. Look here—“ he showed the gathering a design on his tablet screen. “Add these groups here, move these, get rid of these—“ Principal highlighted the steps he had taken. “Pretty soon, you’ve got something that can block the replication cycle of any nanobotic device…it can’t fold along these cleavage lines.”
Principal watched as the techs took turns re-designing his design, but in the end nobody could find anything wrong with it, any reason why it wouldn’t work.
“All we have to do is insert this device into the master assembler of any swarm and, once it’s attached here, the bugger can’t replicate anymore. Presto, end of swarm.”
“It’s just like a Trojan horse,” somebody observed.
Over the next day and a half, the techs of 1st Nano took turns trying to find ways to get around Principal’s Trojan horse, but nobody could. They practiced with the device in sims and wargames until everyone was satisfied it was tactically do-able, that they had a viable technique and a viable device to run a field op with.
Then Principal took the idea to Major Kraft himself.
Kraft listened and watched the sims and animations, studied the designs and the game results, and finally asked one question.
“How soon can you make this gizmo field-ready?”
The next few days saw Table Top buzzing with activity. A new mission had to be tasked and a new detachment formed to take the fold-blocker and make the insertion. The question was: where exactly was the real Symborg master? Kraft gave that question t
o Lofton and Q2, the intelligence shop at the base.
“Most appearances by Symborg are made with copies of the bot master,” Kraft told Lofton one afternoon in his office. Beyond Lofton’s head, the office windows framed a snow-capped Buffalo range several kilometers beyond the mesa that was Table Top. “Your job, Major, is to find me the location of the master assembler and keep it under surveillance long enough for my detachment to approach and make the insert. We’ll have one shot at this and it’s got to work.”
“We’ve got agents, drones and spybots all over the place,” Lofton told him. “Anywhere Assimilationists gather, we’ve got eyes and ears. Some places, my guys look like flies. Other places, my guys look like dust motes, even rain drops. As soon as we can pin down the precise signature of the master, its EM, acoustic, and thermal signature, we’ll have him cornered. Give me two days and I can tell you when Symborg farts and burps.”
“Just his location will do, Major.”
Kraft dismissed the Q2 chief and sent word for another officer to be shown in. Presently, a slender, wiry O-2 showed up at Kraft’s door. The Major waved him in.
“You’re going back to Kolkata, Winger. This time we’re taking out that scumbag Symborg for good.”
The Hotel Metropol, Kolkata
November 18, 2048
1820 hours (U.T.)
The unmarked van crept slowly down the alley off Baksara Road as crowds streaming toward the Howrah Indoor Stadium began to thicken. Ahead, less than a block away, were the gothic columns of the Hotel Metropol.
Q Detachment would enter the hotel by the service door behind the hotel, dressed as utility workers.
Lieutenant Johnny Winger eyed the vast hordes of people surging westward, toward the stages and the lighting stands and the assimilation booths that defined the grounds of the great rally around the stadium, due to start promptly at seven that night.
All these people…just to see and be near a cloud of robotic mechs.
Winger shook his head and looked back inside, appraising each trooper in his six-man squad. All newbies, he told himself. Rookie atomgrabbers, fresh out of nog school. Helms, Lukasc, Jung, Bedard and Livio. And himself, the c/o. All hand-picked for this little venture into Indian country. The Detachment had one and only one mission: locate the master assembler bot that ‘ran’ the Symborg swarm and insert the replication blocker that Table Top labs had developed.
If all went well and the blocker worked as advertised, Symborg—whoever or whatever it was—would be unable to replicate copies of its basic structure. Unable to maintain integrity. Unable to appear before throngs of people as some kind of savior or rock star.
With any luck, the scumbag would eventually disperse and fade away.
That was the plan and it was up to Winger and Q Detachment to carry it out.
“Hotel coming up, Skipper.” Helms, the Defense Systems tech, hoisted up his HERF carbine and, pressing a few hidden switches, collapsed the weapon down to something the size of an umbrella. He stroked the barrel lovingly. “Me and Sweetness here…we’re ready to light ‘em up. Fried or extra crispy…makes no difference to us.”
“Just keep that trigger-happy finger under control, Helms. We don’t want to be waking up the neighborhood if we don’t have to.” That was the problem with Defense System Tech Helms, Winger thought to himself. Anything not labeled Quantum Corps was just like raw meat to be grilled.
The van pulled up to the service entrance and Q Detachment disembarked. Disguised as a utility crew, the troopers got through the security scan and made their way inside.
Intel from Q2 placed Symborg and his entourage at the hotel a few hours before the huge rally, which was to be held on a stage in inside Howrah Stadium. All the troopers were now embedded with ANAD masters, carried in new shoulder capsules. It was a new step and the kinks were still being worked out. Winger wasn’t particularly happy that the Detachment hadn’t been given time to work with their new embeds—you didn’t deploy with weapons you weren’t sure about-- but the mission came first and when the brass said go, you went. Additional weapons and gear, standard issue HERF and mag carbines, were carried in innocent-looking tool boxes.
As a unit, the troopers rode a service elevator to the tenth floor. The door hissed open and right away, a nanobotic security barrier made getting off a hassle. Lukasc jammed the door open, while Jung launched his own embed. They didn’t use HERF or mag on the barrier, since the noise would likely wake up the entire hotel.
“ANAD launched,” Jung reported. A faint sparkling mist issued from the trooper’s shoulder capsule. Immediately, a spider-web of light brightened at the elevator door, as the ANAD master slammed atoms to build out its swarm and engage the barrier bots.
The entrance was momentarily bathed in an eerie blue-white glow as the bot swarms collided. Moments later, the barrier flashed and went dark.
They were in.
Winger led the way. According to intel, Symborg was holed up in a suite of rooms around the corner, rooms 1015 through 1018. Cautiously, Winger crept down the hall, flanked on either side by Jung and Helms. The rest of the Detachment stayed back, to cover the elevator and make a path for their escape.
Winger’s embed carried the replication blocker and would do the basic insert. The Lieutenant knew that the first order of business would be to establish the exact location of the target, though in this case, the target was a collection of bots that could be dispersed just about anywhere.
They reached Room 1015 and found another barrier, pulsating over ornate doors gilded in gold leaf trim.
Don’t want to alert the target, Winger thought. He called a halt to their approach and the troopers hung back at the other end of the corridor.
“Jung, what’s it look like inside? Is the target on-site?”
Corporal Jung was the other DPS tech. He scanned through the walls. “Reading elevated thermals and EMs, Lieutenant. Probably the target but he may be dispersed. I’m not seeing any high concentrations of atomic activity.”
Winger considered that. “We expected that. I don’t want to breach that door barrier. We’ll wake up the whole place. Lukasc, is your solid-phase config ready? My little guys are going to need a little recon.”
“Up and operating, Skipper,” said the CQE (Containerization and Quantum Engineering). “My ANAD embed reports ready in all respects.”
“Very well.” Winger knew they had simmed and wargamed this aspect of the mission several times, though he was still unsatisfied with the Detachment’s performance, but he had kept his mouth shut. Knowing how tight security was around Symborg, the geniuses at the Corps had decided solid-phase penetration was the way to go…get inside the compound right through the wall. “Take your position and launch embedded ANAD—“
Sergeant Lukasc slipped to the front of the squad and squared himself to the wall, pressing a recessed button on his shoulder capsule. In seconds, a twinkling mist had filtered out and formed a spherical cloud of bots hovering over his head.
“ANAD away, Skipper…I need a navigation hack.”
“Squirting it now,” called out Bedard. “Steer left one five zero degrees.”
With that, the recon swarm began to shrink and fade slightly, as the bots disappeared into the wall, maneuvering through a crystalline lattice of atoms, squirming between row after row of silicon and oxygen and aluminum molecules.
“Penetrating nicely, Skipper. I’m going small…try to get a view of what’s happening.” Lukasc went “over the waterfall” in trooper-speak, letting the master bot feed him an acoustic return on what the swarm was encountering. “Looks like standard lattice structure…nothing unusual here. Anticipating lattice boundary in four minutes….we should be inside at that point.”
‘Understood. I’m launching my guys now.” Winger’s embedded ANAD master carried the replication blocker they were tasked with trying to insert into the Symb
org swarm.
But just as he set his own shoulder capsule for launch, something out of the corner of Winger’s eye caught his attention.
Sergeant Helms, Q Detachment’s DPS1, was beginning to de-construct, right before their very eyes.
It wasn’t possible. With security at Table Top tighter than a drumhead, with the Physical Security Verification…but there it was.
Helms was an angel.
“Watch out…!”
“It’s a swarm--!”
“He’s breaking down…!”
Before the rest of the Detachment could react, the cloud of bots that had once been Sergeant Helms was already disassembling right in front of them.
Lukasc was the first to get it. The Helms swarm swelled rapidly, filling out the corridor and falling on the CQE like a desert dust storm.
“AAARRRGGGHHH…get it off…get it off me!!” He was quickly enveloped by the bots. In seconds, only the top of his head and hands were visible.
Already Livio and Bedard were unslinging their HERF carbines. “Fry em! Light ‘em up!”
Barrage after barrage of rf waves boomed and echoed around the hall. Somewhere behind them, a mirror crashed to the floor, splintering into a million pieces.
It was a trap, Winger realized. An ambush. Somehow, some way, in some manner he couldn’t explain, Sergeant Leslie Helms wasn’t Sergeant Leslie Helms, but an angel, and a damn good one at that.
Jesus H. Christ, they’re just like Normals now. You can’t tell ‘em apart.
How long the Helms-thing had been part of the Detachment, he couldn’t say. Fresh out of nog school, so his ID said and recommended by Kraft and others. Not that it mattered. They were outgunned, outswarmed, and the target for sure would not be hanging around after all the commotion outside its suite.
Winger let fly a volley of HERF, shattering the swarm and everything else in the hall. Doors rattled, walls creaked and debris swirled in the gusts of rf like a miniature gale. Someone lit off a few mag pulses for good measure. The magnetic loops slammed into the Helms swarm and fried bots tinkled off the walls and floor like hail stones. But it came back, reconstituted. They always did.
This isn’t gonna work, Winger realized. The swarm was expanding like a supernova in slow motion, burning everything, slurping up all the air in the corridor, pressing ever-outward.
“FALL BACK! Fall back…it’s a trap…fallback to the elevator…!!” he yelled over the concussive booms of HERF discharge.
That was when one arm of the swarm, a limb of bots he hadn’t seen, came at him from behind. It was Corporal Livio who intervened, when he saw the threat. Livio waved his hands, then dived in front of Winger and was soon smothered and choking, falling heavily to the floor, flailing and swatting and kicking and screaming.
Livio took the attack that had speared out at Winger and paid for it with his life.
In the end, only Johnny Winger managed to get away.
The CC1 barely managed to squeeze through the emergency doors at the end of the hall, setting off alarms as he did so. He half scrambled, half fell down the stairs, flinging his carbine away, as he burst into the alley and leaped aboard the van, still parked in the shadows of the utility entrance.
Blindly, he threw the van into gear and screeched off down the alley, nearly colliding with a crowd surging along Baksara Street toward the rally. Winger made a screeching, sliding, two-wheel turn onto Shalimar Road, heading for the Hoogley River bridge, flying past knots of people, sideswiping vendor carts, riding up onto the sidewalks at times. The Tactical Ops center was nearby, holed up in an apartment the Corps had rented for some time, just for Q Detachment’s mission and Winger had to get there, had to let Kraft know what had happened…that they had a spy, a mole inside the 1st Nano. The whole mission had been compromised.
The friggin’ angels are just like Normals, he kept muttering to himself, as he hunted up one street and down another, looking for the apartment. You can’t tell ‘em apart…hell, he’d chugged beers with Helms a half dozen times in training for the mission. They’d played poker together, burped and farted together, played Rocket Commander on their tablets synched together.
Winger wiped sweat from his eyes and slowed the van down. It’s got to be around here somewhere. He felt a prickly crawling feeling all over his neck and back and briefly wondered: did some of the bugs cling to me, did they get aboard? He tried to get a hold of himself, take deep breaths. It’s just adrenalin, he told himself. Just the shakes. Bugs could do that to people.
There…up ahead…that’s it. That has to be it. He slowed the van down outside a three-story brownstone, fronted with immaculate little gardens and landscaping. A nearby sign read: Victoria Memorial 1 Km. Got to be the place.
The thing was: you just couldn’t tell anymore. You didn’t know anymore. Who could you trust now? Hell, maybe even his own ANAD was one of them. How would you know? Maybe the newsvids were right…recently, there had been talk of setting up containment camps and small-scale sanctuaries for those who couldn’t pass the PSV tests, the ‘normality’ tests, some commentators were calling them.
That’s what Symborg kept hammering on at all the rallies, all the speeches and interviews. Normals. Who the hell knew what normal was anymore? Us versus them. Bugs against the Normals. But if Bugs could look like Normals, if they could pass for Normals even on close inspection….
He needed to contact Doc Frost in the worst way, even more than Kraft and Table Top. Doc would know what to do, he’d have ideas on how to know who was Normal and who wasn’t.
He finally found the alley behind the right building and bumped and careened down the pebble and trash-strewn drive, not knowing that in a few short days, he’d be with Doc Frost himself, the two of them working furiously in a new adventure to modify ANAD to deal with the latest threat from Red Hammer.
Winger slammed on the brakes. He fell out of the van and stumbled up the steps to the back door of the apartment.
End
About the Author
Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for 25 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.
To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt’s upcoming work, recent reviews, excerpts and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: https://thewdshed.blogspot.com.
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